Recently I wrote about doing some hacking for the Palm WebOS to create a tube app for K. It’s now in a reasonably usable form so I’ve put up a noddy website and a clone of my repository is available on GitHub.
As it’s at a stage where it works for the person I wrote it for (and a bonus user) it’s unlikely to be developed with any sort of pace, too many other fun things to hack on!
I’ve decided against trying to get it in to Palms app store as I’m fairly certain TFL won’t be too happy with me redistributing their map. There are ways around this but I don’t feel it’s worth it at this time, at the very least I’d need to support rotation and likely a couple of other features before submitting it to the app store otherwise Blunderground will just be a target for flames.
Writing apps for the Web OS is really easy, it’s just HTML and Javascript. I kept falling over the lack of static typing and my ability to create a large typo to LOC ratio but not everyone uses the compiler as a crutch like I do.
The develop/deploy/test cycle, even with the emulator, is a touch clunky. Seems to me a lot of the testing could have been done in a browser with a suitable harness but I didn’t have the inclination to develop that, I shall check out Ares if I write another WebOS application.
Finally interacting with web services wasn’t as rosy as the cloud pushers would have me believe, a significant bulk of the development time so far was spent on trying to figure out how to parse the JSON data TubeUpdates was returning. In the end I gave up and switched to using XML which I manipulated with JavaScript DOM methods and had the functionality running in minutes.